Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Writing Through the Pain: one way to cope when your president triggers you

To start this post, I
opened up Word and chose a blank sheet of virtual paper. Anything can happen on
this page. Hold that thought.

I am reopening this blog, Prodigal Aspersions. Here, I wrote
my way through several years of therapy when I didn’t have enough close friends
to talk to. I talked to myself. Not surprising. I was always a loner as a kid –
up a tree, in my grandparents’ attic, out in the fields, in the empty weekday
church building. There weren’t any kids of my age in Keeling, Tennessee, just older
or younger. But truth be told, I didn’t want any kids brought in. I never knew
what to do with them and by the time I learned, I had come to enjoy my
solitude.

I didn’t always enjoy my childhood. It was populated by some
really good people – Bobby Coulston, Mr. Mac, my own granddaddy highlight the
list. However, there were people who made my life one long dark night with new
shadows and strange, ominous sounds, the kind of night where you hold your
breath and stare at the shadow, willing it to be a newly broken branch or some
clothes left on the line outside. Like when you see and hear frightening things
in the night, I tried to make sense of my experiences. But there’s not a whole
lot of insight available to a child of a violent alcoholic and who has an uncle
who constantly tries to sexually assault her. Add the Asperger’s syndrome,
shake, stir, and pour up a cup of dread.

I grew up. I got that therapy and still do. I talked and
read. I came to understand that the chaos and terror around me had nothing to
do with what and who I am. I was a little kid who should have been enjoyed and
nurtured. It was not my fault. There were people, lots of people, who agreed
with me.

I wrote things along the way – as therapy, in addition to
therapy, for my own sense of worth and expression. I put them here and over in
my other blog Dead Daddy. (Link at right.)

People found me. Looking for kinship, help, answers, they
stumbled onto me. Not a whole lot of people, just the ones who needed what I
had discovered, what I could say out loud.

I went back to college and to grad school and started
writing academic papers, then my own work, and some side hustle gigs. I didn’t
add much here.

I think I need to again. For those who are so tired of being
triggered and poked and stabbed by sexual carelessness. For those who never
said a word and now might want to figure out how. Because I need to do
something positive for my own sake and work through returning demons that I
thought were driven from the space outside the window of my soul’s night.

I am going to write here and at Dead Daddy. I know that
writing can make it better and reading can too. I am going to do what I can to
make it better. Anything can happen here. We are not clean, blank pages on a
screen. Admittedly, we are people who have been through some hard times. If we
were paper we would look rumpled, wrinked, maybe even crumpled up. But we are
not paper. We are people. Our scars are our battle markings. The dented places
in our skins are proof that we escaped from what held us. We can keep looking
to make sense of the shadows of our nights. And we can write and talk about it.
Or just read for now.

On this page, I can tell you how I became a battle-tested
warrior. I can howl and I can laugh. Just wait. Hold on.

Book Shelf

Can It Really Be Taught?: resisting lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy by Ritter and Vanderslice

thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs by Juliana Spahr

One Big Self: an Investigation by C D Wright

Scratch Sides by Kristin Prevallet

An Essay in Asterisks by Jena Osman

Shut Up Shut Down by Mark Nowak

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

Commons by Myung Mi Kim

Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand

Blue Front by Martha Collins

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Zong by M. NourbeSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng

The Midnight by Susan Howe

The Nonconformist's Memorial by Susan Howe

Selected Poems of Charles Olson

Paterson by William Carlos Williams

12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright

The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose by T S Eliot

ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You by Juliana Spahr

Bad History by Barrett Watten

The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Cantos of Ezra Pound

The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer by Mark Allen

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Insel by Mina Loy

Wallace Stegner: Angle of Repose; Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier; Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West; Crossing to Safety